Visualizing Knowledge: Forms, Models and Methods

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As a trained organizational sociologist, I have a long-standing interest in the organization of knowledge. How do people bring together skills and expertise to master challenging collective tasks? How do they learn and acquire new skills? and how do they acquire new knowledge? Under what circumstances does knowledge (of climate change, sustainable food systems, human rights etcetera) lead to action and change? Visualizing knowledge is one of the key tools to build, share, validate knowledge, understand complex problems, and design and build solutions. And there are numerous ways to do that. I’ll write a bit about that below.

My master’s thesis modeled policy management and information flows between the academic departments and the support departments of the Twente University of Technology [1]. I drew maps of managerial knowledge flows linked to the organizational structure of the university, looking into the power and interests structures and coalitions among various parts of the organization: university, schools, service, and support departments, see an example in Figure 1 [2]. That was in 1990.

Figure 1: Interest positions and their exchanges in the organization structure of Twente University (source: Brugman 1989 (cf reference [1]).